3 ms·
This sounds more like confusion about definitions than anything else. If someone was an excess death attributed to the Spanish flu, they might not necessarily
by downerending 7y ago
This sounds more like confusion about definitions than anything else. If someone was an excess death attributed to the Spanish flu, they might not necessarily have ever been a "case", depending on how you define "case". For example, do you have to have been diagnosed by a doctor to be a case? etc.
Beyond that, simplistic summaries like COVID-19 is/is not like the flu seem silly and confusing. Better to just enumerate the ways that it is and isn't, and especially those ways that aren't even really known yet.
- ajross 7y agoA problem that's doubly compounded by notion that the 1918 pandemic was "the flu". The 1918 H1N1 virus, like SARS-CoV-2, was a novel virus. No one had immunity. So yeah, it was "the flu", but it was flu that everyone got all at once. It's wasn't remotely like "the flu" that we get shots for every year. That's one of a big family of endemic viruses[1] to which we all have some immunity by virtue of having had a relative at some point in the past. A bad flu season might have a strain that infects 2-5% of the population, not the 30+% we see with pandemics. [1] Including remote descendants of the 1918 virus which still circulate!